Mihai Sora

"The present contribution has the purpose of evidencing both the originality of Şora’s understanding of time (and its importance for the question of authenticity, empathy and intersubjectivity), and the possibility of a dialogue with Husserl’s understanding of the consciousness of internal time. One of the most important aspects of my paper is the endeavour to bring to light the underlying structure of temporality at work in Mihai Şora’s philosophy. The two forms of temporality present in Şora’s thought – the temporality “of the Moment” and that “of the instances of countable time” – open up the possibility of a phenomenological understanding of time. Some specific terms which Şora uses to describe the two forms of temporality – like the “vertical plunge”, “openness”, “disclosure”, “the gift of Encounter”, “the horizontal walk”, etc. – seem, at least at first, to belong to a poetic language, full of metaphors, a language which doesn’t seem to have much in common with the rigors of a philosophical language, but they nevertheless reveal some fundamental characteristics of the two forms of temporality. The possibility of understanding and interpreting these forms of temporality as structures belonging to the consciousness of time, in a broad sense (which correspond to the fabric of the real word, according to Şora’s ontological model), is another interesting question which will be debated in the present study.

Key-words: time, ontological model, Mihai Şora, Phenomenology, consciousness of time, the temporality of the Moment, intersubjectivity, “the gift of Encounter”, dialogical philosophy, empathy, relation, authenticity."

“MY BEST STUDENT”: MIRCEA ELIADE AND MIHAI ŞORA

The article attempts to reconstruct, for the first time, the long relationship between Mircea Eliade and Mihai Şora, stretching – not without equally long interruptions –, over five decades. Along with the published testimonies of the latter, it takes into account unpublished sources preserved in the Mircea Eliade Papers at the University of Chicago Library: the letters of Mihai Șora and his wife Mariana (published in the Addenda), the unpublished diary of Eliade, etc.
Strongly influenced and inspired by Mircea Eliade’s articles and books, Șora and his future wife became his students at the University of Bucharest, from 1934 to 1938. After a last encounter in Paris, in April 1940, the war separated them completely. When Eliade became himself an exiled in Paris, in 1945, their relationship was resumed and taken to the next level. Mihai Şora collaborated to the French translation of the first books published by his former professor: Techniques du Yoga, Traité d’histoire des religions, and Le mythe de l’éternel retour. Trapped in communist Romania, in 1947, Şora could not contact Eliade for the following twenty years. However, starting from January 1967, he played a principal role in the publication of Eliade’s works in Romania. Eliade attempted to bring him to the University of Chicago as a visiting fellow, but the communist authorities in Bucharest did not allow Șora to leave the country at that time. Nevertheless their bond remained as strong as ever: the old Eliade considered Șora his “best student”, while the old Șora acknowledged Eliade as a major formative influence on him.

In this paper I aim to show that the philosophy of Mihai Şora can both be seen as a phenomenological treatment of being and as a general theory of being in its most rigorous sense. At least, this philosophy could be designated as a phenomenological ontology which opens up itself towards an originally metaphysical perspective based on a specific type of knowledge of the sort of “global disclosure”.
I will argue too that within Şora's philosophy one can have a twofold approach: one starts from what we could call the phenomenology of the “common givenness” (“ordinary/ quotidian givenness”) and then proceeds (in a phenomenological manner) to a general theory of being, which is represented in Şora's philosophy by the constitution of the model of the “sphere with the null ray”; the second commences with the treatment of the ontological model as such (the model, which is already formed, represents in the end the symbolic structure of reality), that is, from this “general theory of being” (or of the constitution of being) and then advances step by step towards various (phenomenological) applications of this ontological model to the multifaceted spheres of the domain of being (the sphere of language, of temporality, of ethics, of the social, of politics, etc.).
KEYWORDS: ontology; metaphysics; structure of reality; ontological model; phenomenology; “common givenness”; Mihai Şora.